ROH
Ismene Brown
Someone sharp as a whip thought hard about the price-fun balance of the latest Royal Ballet triple bill. An accountant, probably. Deep inside the cloisters of the Royal Opera House, they said: “Now top price stalls are £97 each for Romeo and Juliet, that’s nearly £200 a pair. Interval wine at £6 a glass, £24. A programme, train fares from - say - Windsor at £15 each, plus taxis. That’s £260 for their evening. So for the triple, if we’re going to charge £37.50 top whack, we can hardly give them more than a third of the fun, can we?”You gets what you pays for. The new bill must cap most Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard. Even his two most popular and conventional achievements, Romeo and Juliet and Manon, take the classical ballet model and shake it hard into a modern world of rebellious sex that Read more ...
David Nice
A vain, capricious girl sends her lunk of a suitor on a quest for the best ruby slippers in the world, while said lunk's mother, the village witch, cosies up to the Devil. It's a whimsical Christmas Eve tale, exuberantly narrated by Nikolay Gogol in his Ukrainian-based Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka; but you wouldn't think there would be much room for pathos and sentiment. Trust Tchaikovsky to favour the heartfelt and the melancholy in his very characteristic early opera Vakula the Smith, revised at the height of his powers as what the Royal Opera - appealing, perhaps, to dangerous renascent Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The term "Awards Ceremony" can strike terror into the stoutest of hearts, but hats off to the masterminds of the 2009 Classic FM Gramophone awards. Their shindig at the Dorchester was enjoyable, educational, and even intermittently hilarious (and for the right reasons).Mathieu Herzog, viola player with France's Quatuor Ebène who carried off the lusted-after Recording Of The Year award for their disc of Debussy, Ravel and Fauré, even ran Antoine "Eurotrash" de Caunes close as the Frenchman the Brits love to love. Having tried, and failed, to phone his French amis back home to share the moment Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having brought John Dowland to the masses with his album Songs from the Labyrinth, Sting takes another shot at presenting classical music to a wider audience which has developed the infuriating habit of not taking any notice of it. In this live performance, Sting portrays the passionate and tragically short-lived Robert Schumann by reading from his letters, while his wife Trudie Styler enacts the role of Robert’s spouse Clara Schumann (formerly Wieck).In between, selections from the Schumanns' music are played by an ensemble comprising cellist Natalie Clein, pianists Iain Burnside and Natasha Read more ...